Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Ok. But lumping them in together somewhat muddles the numbers. Do we know if the percentage of children placed in sponsored homes who then become unaccounted for is higher or lower than the percentage of children placed with family members.
Some sponsored homes are with family, some are not. But all are in sponsored homes.
Ok. But the implication I got from the article was that it was trying to make a point about "removing children from their families/parents == bad", so the issue isn't whether the home is "sponsored", but whether it's a relative or a non-relative who is taking custody of the child. And that is certainly muddled by the way the numbers are presented.
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I think most of us would reasonably accept that placing the child with a family member will increase the likelihood of later lack of response, simply due to the family being more likely to want to hide the child from authorities (or hide themselves in some cases).
That's a swell guess but it's just a guess. You're also making the guess that non-documented family members in the US are eligible to be sponsors.
Um... Or the much more reasonable "non-guess" that it's not uncommon at all for many people who come to the US illegally (especially if dragging along minor children, or sending them unaccompanied into the states), to have legal resident/citizen relatives living in the US. Those are usually the people they're intending their minor children to live with in the first place (even if just "some of the time" in order to help them stay in the US). So yeah, said family members would certainly have a higher likelihood of not responding to contact requests once the child is in their hands than a non-relative guardian.
While I'm sure it does happen, I'd assume that the rate of non-related sponsors "losing" those children would probably be similar to the rate among any other random set of children in foster care. It happens. But it's rare, and usually involves teens and not "young children". Again though, the implication I got was that this was about claiming that by putting children in non-family homes, they're at risk of "going missing", with some kind of implied nefariousness going on or something.
I don't see data that supports that implication though.
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I don't think anyone was making any of those assertions.
Tirith repeatedly made the point that "well, it includes people who didn't answer the phone". Of course, if I was turning children into stew or something, I probably wouldn't answer the phone either. So what's the percentage of "Well, they didn't answer the phone" missing children who are in some sort of neglect or peril?
What's the percentage of homes you might randomly call in which they don't answer the phone and in which there's a child in some sort of neglect or peril? I don't know. Neither do you. Is the likelihood increased if the child was placed in the home via a sponsorship program versus just living there with their parents? I mean, I guess you could interpret that as arguing *against* it happening
at all, but that wasn't the vibe I got. I got more of a "there's no automatic reason to assume something nefarious in this case". Again, it's more likely that they aren't responding specifically because they are trying to shield the child from immigration officials rather than that there's something horrible being done to the child.
But then, it's hard to gauge that because the article conflates too many different data points, so we can't really get a clear picture of what's going on. If there was some kind of pattern in terms of which sort of sponsoring home maybe correlates to a higher percentage of "failed to answer the phone over X amount of time" outcomes, maybe we could make some kind of guesses as to what is happening. But the article seemed more about generating emotions (on all sides, since the immigration enforcement people could claim that the kinds were "missing" as a means of avoiding immigration law, and the open borders folks could claim they were missing due to some kind of evil plot by the government to take those poor immigrant children and sell them into slavery or something.
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Oh, we have no idea because the official stance of the government is "Once they're in a sponsored family, they're not our problem any more".
Yeah. See my references to foster homes above. It's a pretty crappy scenario and there's no good solution either way.
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And so an 80% success rate in tracking these children is nothing to write home about. But here's the thing: maybe you accept this as "good enough" for children found unaccompanied at the border. Sucks, but you need to find some solution for these kids. But the reason why this is in the news is because the administration is making the completely voluntary choice to take children away from their families -- to
make them "unaccompanied" -- for purely political reasons and put them into this system with an 80% success rate. Enough children that the shelters are now overflowing and
we're erecting tent cities to house another couple thousand children. And these children are probably less likely to have family-sponsored homes to stay at because they
came with their families.
So, you're looping back to the "put them with relatives instead" argument, right? Which would make that whole "where is the 20% that are missing actually coming from" point relevant. If it turns out that the kids that are "missing" are most prevalent in the homes of relatives rather than unrelated sponsors, doesn't that completely step on your core argument? Which would make actually bothering to narrow down those states kinda important.
Edited, Jun 12th 2018 9:02pm by gbaji